I agree that Erlang has a number of capabilities that simplify building distributed systems. However, it is a language and a platform -- one would still need to build a distributed cron application. And as you point out on your blog, it would be difficult to build a sustaining community around such a project developed in Erlang.

One could then argue that the facilities that Erlang provides could be incorporated into other more popular development tools / languages. That suggests the "Source Terminator" project -- combining good ideas from multiple projects. Unfortunately for distributed cron, the work involved in combining Erlang and Mono, or Erlang and Python probably exceeds the effort required to just go ahead and build distributed cron using C the old fashioned way.

It is a shame that it is so difficult to build sustaining projects out of brilliant but unknown languages (check out Aplus ). Likewise a shame that we don't know how to incorporate these ideas into the mainstream more effectively.